Just what has the smell of heather got to do with York? Harry Mead delves into the pages of the ‘scented guide’ to find out

NAME the odd one out among these, ahem, fragrances of York – chocolate, smoke and engine oil, horses, heather, sulphur, daffodils.

No, it’s not sulphur, perhaps thought to have drifted over from spa-town Harrogate.

Among the city’s perhaps over-abundant ghosts, stars of the ubiquitous ghost walks, is one that manifests itself by the nauseous badegg stench.

The horse aroma tells of York as the “Ascot of the North”, while the smell of chocolate evokes its renowned confectionery industry.

Of course the blend of smoke and engine oil signals York’s railway heritage, and the gentle waft of daffodils summons up the glorious girdle of gold that encircles the city walls each spring.

That leaves heather. What has that iconic emblem of sweeping, open moorland got to do with York, smack in the middle of an intensively- farmed plain? Or what has York got to do with heather? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Ah yes, bulking large there is the North York Moors National Park – all 553 square miles of it, containing England’s largest expanse of heather moor. No doubt that’s the link that has gained heather its place in Smell York, an ingenious, if off puttingly-titled, “scented guide” to Yorkshire’s premier tourist city. Sniff the page and there’s a whiff of the illustrated subject – a marvel of modern publishing.

More mystery than marvel is how York came to be attached to the Moors when the national park was established in 1952. Prior to that the district lacked a definite name.

The central moorland was still sometimes referred to as Blackamoor, its ancient name. The terms Cleveland Hills and Hambledon Hills were well used, but if an allembracing name was needed there was nothing better, less cumbersome, than the North-East Yorkshire Moors.

“North York Moors” might seem to have tidied it up nicely. But did it? Geographically, the region would be far more accurately described as the South Middlesbrough Moors. At its closest point, near Roseberry Topping, the national park is a mere 1¼ miles from Middlesbrough’s southern boundary. Roseberry’s summit is within seven miles of the town hall.

By contrast, ten miles separate York from the park’s southern boundary, which is 16 miles from the city centre.

More crucially, while York has had little historic, social or cultural connection with the Moors, Middlesbrough is bonded to it – by ties of iron.

The town’s phenomenal 19th century growth – the fastest in Britain – was triggered by the discovery of ironstone in the neighbouring hills. Grosmont, now best known as the home of North Yorkshire Moors Railway, was one of the earliest sources. Eston, of course, became the Klondyke.

Though (tragically) excluded from the national park, its hills are actually the last, grand fling of the North York Moors, presiding over the Tees estuary. Pictured across the narrow “Guisborough Gap”, they appear on the cover of the official national park guide, looking every inch part of the moorland scene – which they are.

A full-page photo of Eston Nab forms the frontispiece of Frank Elgee’s classic book The Moorlands of North- East Yorkshire. Published in 1912, it remains a key work of scholarship on the North York Moors. But Elgee (1880-1944), who also wrote the equally seminal Early Man in North-East Yorkshire, was a scion of Middlesbrough.

Son of an ironworks clerk, he became the moorland region’s most eminent archaeologist, a distinction he still holds. No fewer than ten august Yorkshire societies funded the memorial stone to him that stands near Ralph Cross on Blakey Ridge. It faces the site of a major Bronze Age burial – apparently of a chief – that he unearthed.

Many of the finds, including two canoes that served as a coffin, are now in the British Museum.

Who can York put forward as a moorland figure to rival Elgee? No-one. The sole figure closely associated with York and the moors is Dr John Kirk, whose collection of folk objects, many from the moors, forms the nucleus of York’s Castle Museum.

But Kirk came from Pickering.

Though a York benefactor, his connection to the city is second hand.

Meanwhile, however, hard on Elgee’s heels another Middlesbrough man made an outstanding contribution to the North York Moors. Bill Cowley created the Lyke Wake Walk. What inspired him was the realisation, seemingly previously unrecognised by others, certainly by anyone in York, that the moorland heather stretched virtually unbroken across the 40-mile width of the national park.

Cowley (1915-84) also carried out much original detailed research on the moors – for instance a study of the archaeology and farming history of Snilesworth, arguably the remotest part of the moors. Writing for The Dalesman, to which he was a regular contributor, he once explained that his moorland apprenticeship began when, as a boy, he used to “walk straight out of Middlesbrough on to the Eston Hills”. It became his habit to go there on New Year’s Eve, returning down Ormesby Bank “as all the bells and buzzers of Teesside heralded midnight”.

Embodied there in one man, the intimate – some might say symbiotic - relationship between industrial Middlesbrough and the Moors could scarcely be better illustrated.

Today, it is citizens of Middlesbrough and the broader Teesside who make up most of the visitors to the North “York” Moors. Middlesbrough folk might be termed “smoggies”. But if any big town can claim heather as an appropriate smell it is Middlesbrough.

Let York stick with its chocolate and smoke-infused engine oil. Even sulphur, if it must.